The Life and Art of Eugène Delacroix The air in Charenton-Saint-Maurice near Paris is heavy with the weight of a changing era when Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix enters the world on 26 April 1798. He does not merely inhabit the 19th century; he defines its emotional pulse. As the leader of the French Romantic school, Eugène Delacroix rejects the cold, calculated lines of the previous generation. He seeks something more volatile. His brush moves with a restless energy that mirrors the societal upheavals of France, trading academic restraint for a raw, individualistic expression of the huma…